God, one or three

The article rings true because I fit the profile pretty well. Someone who is a programmer, is mentally ill, and has had a psychotic break where I have transcribed what I believed was direct communication from God to a web page.

The experience of receiving a direct communication from God is entropic. You have a few options:

You can choose to believe it and keep believing successive communications from God (while staying psychotic) like this man in the article

You can attempt to write off the communications and try to re establish communication with God while sane. The problem with this is once the revelations you had from God while psychotic are found to be frauds you have to actually have a kind of apostasy where your that world of revelations is blown to bits. There is also the problem that compared to the way people say God’s revelations come (a “still small voice”) your direct revelations from God while psychotic seem so much more real. There is also the problem that mental illness messes with your intuition, your mind is so loud the “still small voice” no longer is even audible.

You can believe all communications with God are just going on in people’s heads. The more I see inside myself and the world the more I realize the whole concept of a god that communicates with people is a lie. There may be a god but he doesn’t communicate directly with people the way religious people claim he does. Communication with God is heavily mediated by the brain so naturally if one is mentally ill the communications with God are going to be destructive. It’s a no no in religious circles to say things like, “your mind is what the brain does” but my and many other’s lived experience bares this out.

Which brings me full circle, after a psychotic break you can only choose option 1 or option 3. Technically you can try to choose option two like I did but as your brain gets worse at doing the leg work of simulating interaction with a personal god you will drift off into option one or three.